WARNING: The Populate data is missing on your system

Deadline
1

Hi all, this error “Warning the populate data is missing on your system” keeps crashing some of our jobs and we were wondering if anyone had the same issue. We are not using populate in any of the scenes and we are assuming that is on the default installation of 3dsmax. Any help is appreciated, many thanks

2

Is that the only warning you’re seeing? I’ve never seen that take 3dsMax down but there’s a first time for everything I suppose.

Could you share the log? If you’re not comfortable sharing it out to the internet you can send it to us at https://awsthinkbox.zendesk.com/

3

Hi, having this same exact issue on one of our rendernodes now. Running Deadline 10.1.13.2. Did you find a solution for “The Populate data is missing on your system” error back in 2020?

4

I’m having the same above issue with populate data. Not sure if its the reason some of the nodes are crashing and/or stalling out. I’m not using any populate data either.

5

On our system, the node with this issue is in a set of identical nodes hardware/software wise. I’m not using any populate data either. The problem seems consistent as this is the only machine failing the render due to this reason (not some random crashing on the farm).

6

After installing an update for phoenix fd, more of our nodes started to flag this error, luckily this was helpful in locating the error.

So for anyone running into this issue, the solution I found working for us:

  1. Enable all read/write permissions in the 3ds Max 2021 folder for all groups/users/installers.

  2. Check that all plugins are listed correctly in the plugin.ini file located here:
    \Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2021\en-US\

On our system the phoenix fd and v-ray plugin listing was missing. Likely due to the read/write permissions.